Bay Area Media Focusing on Homelessness in Search of Meaningful Change

The Ingleside-Excelsior Light is proud participate in the San Francisco Homeless Project, an effort by dozens of media organizations to focus coverage for a day on homelessness—a pervasive, systemic issue impacting some of the most vulnerable people.

The Light is contributing to the project three articles: an examination of San Francisco’s work to reduce homelessness since 2000, a report about the social services homeless people receive in San Francisco’s outer neighborhoods and a profile of a San Francisco native who’s been living on the street one block away from his family’s former home for the past three years.

Please read, listen and watch deeply the reporting produced for the SF Homeless Project on Facebook, Medium, SFGate and Twitter (#SFHomelessProject). Below is the project’s mission statement and list of participants.

To the city and people of San Francisco:

Like you, we are frustrated, confused and dismayed by the seemingly intractable problem of homelessness in our city. Like you, we want answers—and change.

We see the misery around us—more than 6,600 people live on the streets of San Francisco—and we sense it is worsening. We feel for the people who live in doorways and under freeways, and for the countless others who teeter on the edge of eviction. We empathize with the EMTs, the nurses and doctors, the social workers and the police. They are on the front lines of this ongoing human catastrophe.

Numerous noble, well-intentioned efforts by both public and private entities have surfaced over the decades, yet the problem persists. It is a situation that would disgrace the government of any city. But in the technological and progressive capital of the nation, it is unconscionable.

So beginning today, more than 65 media organizations are taking the unprecedented step of working together to focus attention on this crucial issue.

We will pool our resources—reporting, data analysis, photojournalism, video, websites—and starting Wednesday, June 29, will publish, broadcast and share a series of stories across all of our outlets. We intend to explore possible solutions, their costs and viability.

Though this is a united effort, we do not claim to speak with one voice. There are many lenses through which the issue of homelessness can be viewed. However, we do not intend to let a desire for the perfect solution become the enemy of the good. We want to inspire and incite each other as much as we want to prod city and civic leaders.

Fundamentally, we are driven by the desire to stop calling what we see on our streets the new normal. Frustration and resignation are not a healthy psyche for a city.

Our aim is to provide you with the necessary information and potential options to put San Francisco on a better path. Then it will be up to all of us—citizens, activists, public and private agencies, politicians—to work together to get there.